iPhone in depth: The Ars review

iPhone, are you ready for your close-up?

On the front of the iPhone there is a single button: the home button. On the left side, there is a silent ringer switch and volume controls; on the top, a recessed headphone jack, a sleep/wake switch, and the SIM card slot. There is nothing on the right side of the phone, and a tiny camera lens rides on the back.

Naturally, the most noticeable thing about the iPhone is its large screen and lack of physical buttons. This is due to the love-it-or-hate-it touchscreen interface which has been charged with essentially handling all user input and interaction with the device. From a visual standpoint, the screen interface is big, bright, and full of contrast. Despite the fact that the glossy glass surface does get very smudgy after much use, when the screen is on, the smudges are a non-issue because you can't easily see them. Of course, the iPhone isn't a napkin, so handling it with sticky hands or putting it up to your face with smudgy makeup on will muck up the screen, requiring a clean. Overall, we love the screen. We'll talk about the screen further in relation to its brightness and settings in a bit.

Activation and Syncing

The first thing you have to do once you take the iPhone out of its box is turn it on and activate it. No part of the iPhone's functionality—including that of the iPod—is accessible until the phone is activated through an AT&T plan (without hacking).

Unlike most phone plans in the US, the iPhone can be activated at home on your own computer, where you get to choose the plans, how you want to activate it, and more through iTunes. This requires the recently-released iTunes 7.3 and can be done on both Macs and Windows. Although we did the majority of our testing on a Mac, we also went through the whole process on Windows.

Once you connect the iPhone to the computer through the USB cable, the computer automatically recognizes the iPhone as new and walks you through the steps in order to activate it. You need to have an iTunes login to be able to do this.

Even if you are a current AT&T customer and plan to transfer your plan over to the iPhone, you have to do so through the computer activation process in order to transfer your number to the included SIM in the device (you cannot pop your old AT&T SIM into the iPhone, according to AT&T). Users of other carriers can also transfer their numbers to AT&T through the iTunes interface. If you want to activate an entirely new plan, that can be done as well. Apple has posted an instructional video on its web site to walk users through the activation process.

Upon entering your billing information, iTunes will ask you for your Social Security number or an AT&T credit check code. As with most cell phone carriers in the US, AT&T requires a credit check before you can begin a new contract with them. By entering your Social Security number, you are authorizing AT&T to run a credit check on you on the spot to make sure that you can use the service. If you bought the phone from an AT&T store instead of an Apple Store, they may have already performed a credit check on you and provided you with a number to enter at the iTunes screen.

AT&T charges a $36 one-time activation fee for the iPhone, and the lowest available iPhone plan is $59.99 per month. This includes 450 "anytime" minutes, unlimited data, visual voicemail, 200 SMS messages, 5,000 night and weekend minutes, rollover minutes, and unlimited mobile to mobile minutes. There are various other plans for the iPhone that are exactly the same as the one we just mentioned, except that they offer more anytime and night and weekend minutes. There are also family plans available and plans for existing customers to add an iPhone onto their existing rate plans. Users who want more SMS messages can also add on more for additional fees. All available rate plans can be found on Apple's web site.

As mentioned on Infinite Loop, however, it is possible to activate an iPhone without committing to AT&T's "required" 2-year service plan. By entering "999-99-9999" into the Social Security field, you will get booted into GoPhone (AT&T's prepaid phone plan that does not require a contract) mode. An equivalent voice plus data plan under GoPhone comes out to about $10 more per month than a similar plan under contract, and so this may be a very attractive option to those who aren't interested in committing to AT&T for long periods of time. Seeing as AT&T isn't subsidizing the iPhone's cost when you sign a contract (as most carriers do in order to entice customers with steep phone discounts), it doesn't seem as if there is much reason not to go this route unless you are interested in saving $10 per month and don't mind being in a contract for two years. This is the simplest way to activate the iPhone without a contract without getting into some hackery, which we will discuss in a later section. It will cost $175 to break an iPhone contract with AT&T if you choose to leave before the two years is up (although if you cancel the contract within 30-days of activation, you will not get charged an early termination fee. If you return an open-box iPhone within 14 days of purchase, Apple will charge you a 10 percent restocking fee).

Activation typically only takes a few minutes, although many users reported on launch day that activation took them several hours, if not several days. AT&T claims to have fixed this problem, however, and so activation should really only take less than five minutes.

Once the iPhone is activated, the phone will inform you of this, and iTunes will ask you what you want to sync with the device. The iTunes interface for syncing the iPhone is very similar to that of the iPod, except with more options. Here, you can specify among the various tabs which e-mail accounts, music, photos, calendars, and contacts from your address book you would like to sync (if at all).

We chose to sync all of our e-mail accounts, address book contacts, a few playlists and videos, and one photo album for testing purposes. The process went fine on a Mac with no hitches, and it acted just as it would when syncing an iPod. Unlike an iPod, however, the iPhone does not mount as a USB storage device, and so it cannot be used as an external hard drive. There are currently efforts under way to hack this functionality, but as of this writing, major progress has not been made on that front.

On Windows, the story was a little different. We had no problem setting up the phone on Windows XP, but when we turned to Windows Vista, frustrations abounded. First we were dismayed to learn that no 64-bit version of Windows is even supported. Then when we tried to set up the phone on 32-bit Windows Vista, we had several problems.

The main culprit was "AppleMobileDeviceHelper," a small applet with a penchant for crashing and leaving our synchronization attempts stranded. Some users told us that disabling DEP fixed the problem for them, but the only fix we found was the good ol'-fashioned "keep trying 'till it works!" approach. And, the good news is that it did eventually synchronize the contents of iTunes with the iPhone, at which point all of the problems stopped. However, we experienced problems on three different Vista test machines, so it is quite obvious that iTunes 7.3 isn't up to snuff on Vista, but that's not saying much, since iTunes hasn't run well on Windows since, well, ever. iTunes performance on Windows Vista is particularly embarrassing though, and we can only assume that Apple doesn't feel like Vista is big or important enough to support better than they do. Again, you can get your phone to work, but it may take you five tries before you break past the problem.

Now let's dive into General Usage.